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Public Library Head Faces Critics of Renovation Plan

The New York Public Library came under fire Tuesday night during a panel discussion held to debate its $300 million plan to remake its flagship Fifth Avenue branch.

“We’re being told that the only way to save the library is to rip out its innards,” said David Nasaw, a panelist and a history professor at the City University Graduate Center, who called the plan “fatally flawed.”

“It might be best to start over again,” he said. “This boat doesn’t float.”

Anthony W. Marx, the library’s president and also a panelist, argued that the redevelopment, which is still in planning, was essential to the library’s future.

“The current status quo cannot be maintained and should not be maintained,” he said.

The library’s much-debated project, known as the Central Library Plan, would turn the Fifth Avenue research center partly into a circulating library by selling two popular locations — the Mid-Manhattan branch and the Science, Industry and Business Library — and folding their operations into the main building.

To make room for the new circulating library, the plan calls for putting up to half of the three million volumes in the stacks under the main reading room into storage in New Jersey.

The discussion was held at the New School in Greenwich Village and was organized in part by the authors of a petition protesting the renovations, who invited the library to participate.

Critics on the panel said that the changes would diminish the library’s role as a leading reference center, that the money should be directed instead toward rejuvenating dilapidated branch libraries and that the retrieval of books was likely to take too long. “I’d rather have books available,” Mr. Nasaw said, “than a nice place to read.”

Photo

Panelists debated the renovations being considered at the New York Public Library Tuesday night in Greenwich Village. Anthony W. Marx, the library's president, is second from left.Credit
Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

Mr. Nasaw also questioned the library’s promise that off-site volumes would be available in 24 hours, since, he said, there are currently delays with those already in storage. “If it’s going to work tomorrow, why doesn’t it work today?” he asked.

Mr. Marx and Robert Darnton, a professor at Harvard who serves on the library’s board and was on the panel, said that the library was in dire financial straits. Since 2008, they said, the number of curators has dropped to 51 from 64, and the book-acquisitions budget has declined to $11 million annually, from $15 million. “There is unrelenting financial pressure,” Mr. Darnton said. “We really cannot go on with business as usual.”

Mr. Marx said the plan would save $12 million to $15 million a year that could be used for buying books and hiring librarians. “If other people have other schemes that can come even close to that kind of financial benefit to the library, I’d be interested,” he said.

Mark Alan Hewitt, an architect, preservationist and historian who was on the panel, said the library should expand circulation elsewhere, rather than in its landmark Fifth Avenue building, whose stacks were built for books and will be difficult to renovate. “Leave 42nd Street alone,” he said.

“To take the stacks down is to me a mistake that New Yorkers will feel for generations to come,” he added.

Charles Petersen, an associate editor at the magazine n+1, called the project shortsighted, given the uncertainty about the future of research. “There is good reason to be skeptical about doing something this drastic right now,” he said.

Joan Scott, a social science professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, was the final panelist. She helped draft the petition, given to Mr. Marx this month, which was signed by more than 1,000 writers, scholars and artists protesting the plan.

The renovation, designed by the British architect Norman Foster, is to be financed with $150 million from the city, proceeds from the sale of the two libraries and private donations.

Despite Mr. Marx’s assurances, the panel’s critics remained skeptical of the plan. “Having heard it so eloquently defended,” Mr. Nasaw said, “I’m more than ever convinced that it has to be scrapped or changed.”

A version of this article appears in print on May 23, 2012, on page A19 of the New York edition with the headline: Public Library Head Faces Critics of Renovation Plan. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe